


The Book That Was Bound In Leather Dyed Grey

by eleutheria_has_won



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alien Mythology/Religion, Auxiliatrices, Character Study, F/M, Family, Family of Choice, Found Family, Gen, Jadebloods, Religion, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Sufferists, The Cult of the Signless Sufferer
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-04-23
Updated: 2014-04-23
Packaged: 2018-01-19 19:15:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,160
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1480957
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/eleutheria_has_won/pseuds/eleutheria_has_won
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When Feferi Peixes is six sweeps old, a woman whose face she never sees gives her a small book, unmarked and bound in grey-dyed leather. </p>
<p>When Feferi Peixes is twelve sweeps old, she still has the book that changed her life, not always for the better, and she can never, ever bring herself to say it wasn't worth it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Book That Was Bound In Leather Dyed Grey

It is exactly three days before she turns exactly six sweeps old, and Feferi Peixes is bored out of her mind. There are no things she has yet to do, and try as she might, she can't come up with even a single extra task. All her games and baubles hold no interest for her in this mood. Eridan is nowhere to be found, too busy with that one cerulean he FLARPs with - Feferi can't quite remember what the name was, but she thinks it's the one who likes spiders or something - to answer any message she might send. (Not that she _would_ bother to send him a message, anyway; Feferi has been thinking, recently, of what it would be like to _not_ be with Eridan, despite how the guilt of the thought gnaws at her. She's just not _happy_.) Though she does have other names on her chump roll, she knows them only vaguely, mostly because they're all friends-by-proxy through Eridan. She has never talked to most of them, and those of them she has, she didn't like all that much. She doesn't especially want to try and contact them, either.

Aside from that, she has very few other friends. And by very few, she means really none at all. When she was much, much younger, there had been a few others who she met on her rambles, all of them to the troll sea-dwellers in various shades of indigo-violet. (She's never actually left the ocean before.) For a while, that had been fun, but after a sweep or so they reached the age where school-feeding began through the day, and all the mandatory feeds began, including the one on the hemohierarchy and who, exactly, was the Empress. After that, she started cutting ties, one by one, until she left with just Eridan for company.

(She didn't want _minions_ who would bow and scrape at her feet, she wanted _friends_ to play with, and honestly, why would they think she wanted _that_ in the first place? (Later, Eridan showed her the schoolfeed on respecting the Empress and proper hemospectrum behavior for violets, and she stopped wondering.))

Now, she is lonely and bored, and restless as a result of both. Caught up in her pique, she floats in the center of her respite block, a mess made of her legs, arms, and hair sprawled out around her, watching her cuttlefish squiddle about (that is shoal-tally a reel word, Eridan!) (that one wwas a little out there fef) out of the corner of her eye while she stares at the ceiling. She has been doing this for the past three hours.

She is _so. Bored._

So bored.

(If Feferi Peixes had been anything other than what she was - a young troll of the Alternian Empire, somewhat prone to naivete and ignorance, as young trolls almost always are - she might have had the thought to send up a prayer of some kind for something to do to relieve her boredom. As she is now, however, Feferi Peixes (as with all of her peers) has never the word "prayer" before, and the odds say she never will. Outside of a few obscure cults (both sanctioned and not), the Alternian Empire does not have the cultural concept of an all-important truth or higher power, much less the concept of an entire community dedicated to the service of one such ideal, and as such the thought does not even occur to her.)

(Nonetheless, her prayer is answered.)

(When have the odds ever been something that couldn't be beaten?)

The chime of a message, received on the husktop Eridan had given her for her last wriggling day, sounding somewhere below and to the right of her head, brings Feferi's eyes open. She considers. On one hand, if it's someone she dislikes or doesn't know very well, she's too bored _not_ to talk to them. She'll be stuck in some insufferable conversation with someone she's never met, and with her current odds, they'll probably be obnoxious or rude or just plain creepy.

On the other hand, she's _too bored not to talk to them._

By this point, it's hardly a proper decision at all.

After a moment, she coils and twists in one long, lithe movement, the kind that make Eridan look at her like she's something too strange for it not to be beautiful. She comes to rest on her knees in front of the screen, hands already reaching for the keys. The message has come through Trollian, but it's not from any name or handle she knows, which is not surprising. Nor is it one she's heard Eridan mention before, which...honestly? Is more than a little surprising. No one knows her handle except for Eridan and his buddies, and she has no idea where else this mysterious messager might have gotten it from. And this is mysterious, if nothing else. She frowns. The message has neither title, nor identifying features. The other troll's handle is strange - **waitingforHim** \- does not fit the usual format, and there's not the slightest hint of a blood color.

Eridan would tell her to "seariously fef its wweird spam is all just get rid a it", but Eridan's not here right now. Feferi is bored and this message is the most interesting thing to happen to her in at least a week. So Feferi, sticking her tongue at mental-Eridan's scowl, reaches forward, whisks her fingers across the squeakbeast pad, and clicks the button that says "ACQUIESCE."

What opens onto her screen is not a chat.

Instead, her screen freezes with a muted whine. Feferi hisses, startled. Oh, no, please don't let her husktop be kraken. (Okay, even she has to admit that was a pretty bad one.) Eridan would rub it in her face for days, if he didn't krill himself laughing first. Hesitant, she reaches forward and taps at the screen with her pointer claw. She really doesn't know much about technology. It's not really her thing.

Somehow, though, that seems to work - or at least, her screen begins changing again, which is pro-bubbly some shore-t of progress, she thinks miserably. Instead of unfreezing, the entire thing begins to fade slowly out to white, until her screen is completely blank, then fades darker until the screen is black. Tapping it again has no effect. She groans. Eridan is going to laugh forever.

At the top of the black screen, a blinking cursor appears, and starts moving steadily across the page, leaving numbers in its wake. Feferi squints. No, she's pretty sure she's not wrong. That looks familiar somehow, the format of the numbers, two big groups made up of little segments of two or three digits, followed by a letter. Then a period, then the next segment, then after a few segments a comma, a space, then the next group...

Below the numbers, words appear.

DO NOT BE AFRAID.

"This is where we will be," Feferi sounds aloud, "As the sun sets, on the night you turn six, we will be waiting."

Feferi leans back and wrinkles her nose. Well, that's not ominnowous at all! "Honestly, this is rideelculous..." She mutters out loud. But her curiosity is still there, and the words seem to be finished being foreboding for the moment, so she turns her attention back to the numbers and huffs. They reelly are familiar, where has she...? What are...?

Coordinates! The answer comes to her in a flash. Planetary coordinates, like on Eridan's maps of the sea. She leans back and grins widely. The mysterious troll on the other end of this - whatever this is - has sent her coordinates to somewhere on Alternia. She couldn't say it for a fact, but she's sat through a lot of Eridan talking about this kind of stuff, and so she's pretty sure that while she doesn't know _exactly_ where these coordinates will take her, they do lead actually somewhere relatively close to here. In the same hemisphere, at least. Maybe farther west, towards the coast...?

The cursor starts typing, and she hastily snaps her gaze down to watch. She's forgotten a lot of her apprehensions by now. This is all very exciting, aft-er all! She might actually be having some searious fun with this!

The cursor's next words, though, make her suddenly very nervous and very, very still. Even through text, they somehow have the air of a ritual - or of a prophecy.

May His Words Live On, So That We May Never Forget The Worth Of Suffering. We will meet you there, Feferi Peixes. Have faith. 69

And the screen begins to fade back to white.

After a second of gaping, Feferi jumps and says some very impolite things, once she realizes that the coordinates are fading away just as fast the rest. She scrabbles around for something to write with. She grabs a pen just in time to scribble down the first bit or so on her arm - before it all disappears entirely, and she's left with a perfectly working husktop and no sign that anything was ever wrong.

Frowning now, for entirely different reasons than before, Feferi pauses, reaches out to very carefully shut the husktop's lid, and continues - more contemplative than frantic this time - to write down what she can remember of the rest of the coordinates. When she's done, she squints at what she has on her forearm and decides that it is as close as memory can get her, and if it's wrong, it's at least close enough.

Her hands are shaking when she tries to recap the pen. It takes her a few tries.

Feferi is still curious. Desperately so. But now, she's also scared. Suddenly, the idea of tracking down the coordinates on her arm and going where ever they take her on the evening of her wriggling day for some grand, secretive adventure makes the pen drop from her nerveless fingers. The water in her lungs feels as easy to breathe as solid rock. She wants to cry, a little bit. _How do they know her name?_

She does none of these things. Instead, she very calmly and quietly stands up, roots around in her things until she finds a different device she can contact Eridan on, and sends him a quick message that she's "just koi-ing to pop by your )(ive for a minute oar two, iffin you don't mind! i need to borrow some maps 38)". She is careful to make her message sound normal, authentic; she ignores, equally careful, how the little smilie face she adds at the end after a moment's thought makes her feel a bit sick. (The only reason she can think of, that a stranger would know her name, who she was, is an assassination attempt. Or revenge.) Then she sets the device back where she found it, does not look at her arm at all, and slips out through the window, setting her course for Eridan's hive as she said.

This isn't just some curiosity anymore; this is someone who knows who she is and how to find her, and in return she knows nothing about them at all. If she doesn't face them now, they will keep trying. Fear grips her, tight as a set of jaws. She is afraid - and that is exactly why she has to go.

(If it's revenge, it will be for a harvested lusus, and if it's their lusus the stranger's avenging what if they go after her morayeel, her Orphaner, instead.)

She is Feferi Peixes, Heiress to the Alternian Empire, a princess born of tyrian blood. Someday, she will stand before her Ancestor, matching tridents in their hands, and she will kill or be killed. This is no longer a question of whether or not she might want to discover the secrets hidden in the message. Right now? Feferi wants to reconsider. But in this, she can no longer be just Feferi. She is the Heiress - and no matter how much Feferi doesn't really want to find these secrets as much anymore, the Heiress needs them. So she has no choice - it's hardly even a proper decision at all. She will go.

And she will not let the shaking of her hands, which has not ceased since she left her hive, stop her.

(Sweeps in the future, but not many; she will learn that this will to persevere is the first and greatest of her strengths, but it is not the last; she will be glad of the determination that has stood her in good stead all this time, and she will not be the first to be so - or the last; and she will know that this was quite possibly the best decision she ever made)

Eridan's hive is vast, but she finds the map room easily enough. The organization system - or lack thereof - gives her a minute's pause, but it only takes her ten minutes of looking to find a map of the entire planet, complete with neat, precise lines labeled, according to their inclination, "latitude" and "longitude." (No sense taking chances, after all, not with something like this.) The map is massive; she clears off a table bigger than her recuperacoon and lays the map out there. Carefully (careful, careful, she can not afford to get it wrong), she checks the first set of numbers on her arm, memorizes them, and then turns to the map and begins to track down the parallel she needs.

As it turns out, she wasn't wrong. The coordinates fall squarely on the coastline to the west, right on top of a little beach in the middle of nowhere. There are no dots that mean cities nearby, nor are there the abundance of littler lines that Eridan once told her meant roads, a bunch of which would then - also according to Eridan - indicate the presence of neighborhoods. She and her - contact, will be utterly alone. She tells herself that this is acceptable, and she is fine with it. If worst comes to worst, it means that no one else will be caught in the crossfire.

It is, however, a little farther up the coastline than she could manage in an easy hour's trip, and the meeting is at sunset. She will have to leave the night before, so that she may get there and find a safe place to sleep for the day and still be there in time.

It is with that in mind that she returns home, a slightly smaller map just of the area she needs in tow, and begins to pack. By the time she has her bag ready, it is close enough to dawn that Feferi feels comfortable slipping into her recuperacoon earlier than normal. The sopor haze feels like a benediction to her restless mind, and by the time the sun breaks the horizon she is asleep.

By the next evening, her terror has settled down and become merely a dull burn of fear in the back of her mind. Instead, her resolve has settled firmly into place, and she is determined. Her curiosity, as well, has returned to the center stage in her mind. She still fears the evening of her wriggling day, but at the same time the hours seem to drag by in a way that is nearly unbearable. It may be the death of her, but that does not mean she doesn't still want to _know_. It's exciting, after all!

Eridan shows up around midnight, sporting a few new bruises and complaining with relish of how infuriating the spidertroll - named Vriska, apparently - is to him. Her moirail, Feferi thinks with a fondness like she hasn't felt for Eridan in perigees, is nothing if not the exact opposite of subtle. She wishes, with a sudden fierceness, to tell him everything that happened the night before, confess all her confusion and fear, to bury herself in his arms and let him calm her. Then he asks her, "Oh, hey, Fef, I got your message last night. Sorry I didn't say somethin back. I was kinda in the middle a somethin with Vris, if you know what I mean." He winks at her, conspiratorial in a way that just makes her feel a little slimy. "What did you need those maps for, anyway?" And the thought of confiding in him shuts down hard enough that she almost chokes on her own words for a moment. She coughs once and passes him off with some excuse about looking up something that was mentioned in one of her schoolfeeds. Then she sees her chance.

"Actshoally..." she says, "One of the shoreces I'm looking for isn't one a lot of people have. It's pretty rare, as a manta of fact! I found somebody who can net me a copy, but they live pretty far away, so I'm going to have to go out to their hive to pick it up."

"Yeah?" Eridan says without much interest (he is not very subtle in that, either.) "How long you gonna be gone?"

"I'm planning to ship out a few oars before sunrise," she replies, "If everything turns out shipshape, I'll be back in harbor by midnight tominnow!"

He shrugs. "Sounds like loads a fun."

He leaves, not long after that.

Soon, the hour has come for her to leave. She isn't nervous, she tells herself firmly. That's the anticipation fluttering in her gut. She is the Heiress, and she can do this. She pulls her bag over her shoulders, settles it comfortably on her back, and leaves without another glance.

The journey is difficult, but not overly so. She sees no one, save for a passing glimpse of a white silhouette a dozen leagues off that might have been somebody's lusus. She thinks she's gotten herself lost a few times, but she's always back on course soon enough. She reaches the beach before the sun rises, which is good, with not much time to spare, so she doesn't get the chance to take a look around and get her land legs. (This will, after all, be her first time ever really leaving the safety of the ocean for the world of the mainland.) Less than a league off shore, she finds a nice little hollow in the sea floor to tuck herself in for the day, and she settles in easily enough. Two sopor pills, and sleep takes her.

(The nightmares find her anyway.)

When Feferi wakes, the sun has only just begun to touch the horizon, though she doesn't dare peek to figure how much is "only just." When the light filtering through the water finally seems dark enough, she peeks her head out and swims up to the surface, looking back in the direction of the beach. There is someone standing there, waiting. She feels like she just touched a lightning bolt. But it is far too late for turning back now, and so she swallows roughly, just once around the lump in her throat and perseveres.

Her resolve is sorely tested, however, when she pulls herself from the waves for the very first time, tottering upright until she thinks she could probably fight a bit if she had to, and looks up to see what, given the size of the hooded and robed figure, is very obviously an adult. For a moment, everything she's ever heard or learned about adults and what they do to wigglers screams through her head, locking her joints solid in panic. But the woman - the figure seems like a female, Feferi thinks, something in the slenderness or the posture - does not roar with madness and move to cull her. She just stands there, hands folded in the long, loose sleeves of her gray robes, face utterly hidden from sight by the hood. By the little accents of jade green Feferi can almost see, here and there, she thinks the figure might be one of the caretakers of the Mother Grub, the grim-faced, solemn Auxiliatrices who dwell in the Brooding Caverns unseen by any troll besides themselves. She finds that reassuring, a very tiny bit. Auxiliatrices are some of the few adults actually intended to be on planet - this is no criminal. at least not because of that. She has absolutely no idea, however, what on Alternia an Auxiliatrix might want with any six-sweep-old, much less her.

The woman has also yet to speak.

"Who are you?" Feferi tries first, "What do you want with me?"

"I have something for you," the woman says instead in a sonorous adult voice that puts chills down Feferi's spine. "A package I was bid deliver."

"What?" Feferi says, confused. All this glubbing secrecy for, what - supplies delivery?

The woman does not elaborate. Instead, she reaches inside her sleeve and pulls out something wrapped in tan cloth, roughly the size of a hand, holding it out to Feferi in a clear offer. When it also becomes clear that no, the Auxiliatrix will not toss the package or set it down, Feferi steels herself and inches closer, until she can reach out and take it from the woman's hand. Package in head, she rears backwards, prepared for an attack - but still the woman does nothing, merely tucking her hand back into her gray sleeves without another word. Feferi moves back a respectable distance again, then, keeping a wary eye on the adult, folds back the tan wrappings at the top of the - gift?

It is not what she expects at all.

It is a book.

It seems old enough, if maybe a little shoddy - this was not printed on the Imperial presses. Instead, Feferi can see where the pages were sewn and glued into the binding, probably by hand, and the pages are all just slightly different sizes, enough to bring some texture when Feferi runs her fingers over them. The cover material is not the glossy paper or plastic of Imperial-issue books, either; instead, it is made of unmarked leather, smooth and supple, belonging some land-dwelling beast Feferi supposes she is simply unfamiliar with. Instead of remaining brown or tan, however, the leather has been dyed a silvery, metallic gray, the color of polished iron - or of the Auxiliatrix's robes. She's lucky, though - a quick rub with her thumb for texture tells her the book has at least been waterproofed, enough that she can take it home through the ocean undamaged. There are no markings on cover or spine; as far as Feferi can tell, this is a book so odd and innocuous, it does not even have a title.

"...what is this?" she asks in confusion, looking. "I - I reelly don't understand water you on aboat."

The Auxiliatrix's head tilts, and the hood shifts just enough for Feferi to see the bottom half of the woman's - definitely a female's - face.

She is smiling.

Slowly, as Feferi is transfixed by the small, kind smile - so weird! - the Auxiliatrix's hands emerge from her sleeves. She brings them up slowly to be level with her ribs, making sure that Feferi can see them at all times. Then she does something with them, makes a shape or sign or something that Feferi has never seen before. Her thumbs are touched to her pointer fingers, making a circle for each hand, while all the other fingers straighten out into and curve slightly inward. Then, the Auxiliatrix places her hands one above the other, palms facing one another, so that the tips of the outstretched fingers are equal with the circle of the other hand. It's unfamiliar as a hand symbol, because she's pretty sure she's never seen someone do that with their hands before, but despite that, Feferi still has a nagging sense that she should almost be able to recognize it some how. From where, she doesn't know.

"May His words live on in you, Feferi Peixes," the woman says gently, a smile on her face and a symbol held in front of her chest. "Never forget the worth of suffering, nor the price. Raise not your hand to your brothers and sisters, for there is not one of them that is not in some way your equal. Know that peace may be as powerful as war, mercy as powerful as vengeance, and forgiveness more powerful than hate. And above all?"

The woman grinned.

"Have faith."

And with that, the Auxiliatrix turns and leaves, quickly vanishing into the distance with her powerful adult's stride. Within moments, it's like the land has swallowed her up. She is gone. It is as if she had never been. Feferi Peixes, age six sweeps (as of about a hour ago), stands on the beach alone, a small book bound in silver-gray leather in her hands. She is left with the sensation, somehow, of a dream, or a visitation. The only thing that seems real anymore is the book in her hand, which she contemplates. Then, slowly, with her six-sweep old eyes wide, Feferi Peixes opens to the first page.

 

  
  
  
_fin_


End file.
